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The Commentary

Rhys and Jamie

Rhys and Jamie

Even before late August’s tragic incident of the murder of little Rhys Jones in Liverpool by a teenaged gunman, politicians were talking of ‘breakdown Britain’.

The Bible spells out certain fundamentals on how fallen human society works. It therefore enables us to foresee the future. Anyone using God’s Word could have predicted what would happen to our land years ago. In fact they did. Back in 1971 many Christians came together in London for the Nationwide Festival of Light to warn the government which had presided over the permissive society and the ‘swinging 60s’. But their warning was ignored. Now we are reaping the harvest. It is not just gangs and guns on our streets. There are, as we all know, epidemics of family breakdown, drug culture, binge drinking, teenaged pregnancy, sexually-transmitted diseases, gambling addiction, abuse of the elderly (and terrorism).

The secular delusion

The secular delusion is that we don’t need God. In fact, life is better without him. The apostle Paul speaks of this as a delusion. For example, in Ephesians 4.17-19, he describes those without God and ‘the futility of their thinking’. Within that passage you find a progression. Cut off from God we are in spiritual darkness. That darkness leads to ignorance of God. That ignorance makes us hardened or insensitive. (How callous our society has become when a little ten-year-old can be shot down in cold blood?) This in turn means people do not know the life of God in them as the source of joy and wholeness.

This is proved by the way they live. Having rejected God, people try to fill the vacuum in their lives with other things. We live for our holidays or our new cars. We love our meals, our money, our music, our sex lives. We idolise celebrities instead of God. But the point is it never satisfies. There is a ‘continual lust for more’ (v.19). It is never enough. And because it is never enough people start wanting what others have and hence the cut-throat world of business at one level and the gangs on the streets at another. People get mangled and society breaks down. Secularism is a delusion. Yet people keep believing it.

Our leaders still labour under the delusion that they don’t need God to fix the nation. Think back 14 years to the manslaughter of the toddler Jamie Bulger. The immediate reaction of some was: ‘This is a blip; a unique horror and no gauge of our society.’ But things have simply got worse; 18 youngsters were murdered on London streets this year alone. However, some politicians did take the situation seriously. We had John Major’s ‘Back to Basics’. Tony Blair followed with ‘Tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’. It did no good. Politicians can’t fix decades of moral and spiritual decay.

The life of God

But thank God there is another way. Rachel lives on an estate for naval families. One of her neighbours recently became a Christian. She was so full of it that she was round at Rachel’s house at 6.00 am to tell her all about it. Rachel said: ‘As soon as I opened the door, I could see she had been saved. It was written all over her face!’ There is a joy, a wholeness, a peace and a power which breaks into our hearts when we become Christians. It is, in a famous phrase, ‘The life of God in the soul of man’. But without Christ, people are separated from the life of God and society keeps on disintegrating.

John Benton